Back in 2014, President Barack Obama, instead of wearing one of his usual navy blue suits, decided to wear a tan suit. Conservatives across the country decided to criticize President Obama for his apparently huge mistake (oh brother!). I never saw President Obama wear a tan suit again.
Obama gave them up to avoid the controversy in the future. It was an easy thing to change. No one went hungry because he went back to navy suits. No wars were started. Nothing bad happened.
President Obama was willing to give this win to Conservatives because it really made very little difference in the scheme of things, and that is yet another way that he showed his great wisdom. One can tell from President Obama’s entire Presidency that his attitude was that if something made little difference to him, but made a big difference to others, he tried to be accommodating.
By the same token, if something was truly important to him, he stood his ground. When Republicans tried to destroy his signature accomplishment of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) by shutting down the Federal Government, he stood his ground. He stood his ground, and he won, and the Republicans looked like fools. At times he bent when it made sense to bend, like a tree does in the wind so it does not break. At other times he was a rock—unmoving and unyielding--like all good Presidents should be.
Now, if there is one thing that I have noticed in my time of observing politics, it is that there are a few things that Republicans are consistent on. And If there is anything that Republicans are consistent on, it is their hatred of Democrats who are effective. They hated FDR; they hated Bill Clinton; they hated Barack Obama. The better a Democrat was at pushing the Democratic agenda forward, and the better they were at pushing the Republican agenda back, the more they are hated.
However, they loved twenty-first Century Joe Lieberman. They loved how he had his Vice Presidential Debate with Dick Cheney, and when Dick Cheney said in that debate that his company Halliburton received no money from the Federal Government (when it had in fact received over two billion dollars from the Federal Government) Lieberman did not contradict him.
They loved how when Dick Cheney talked about the “miracle” of education reform in Texas under Governor George W Bush, Lieberman had not done his homework. If he had, he would have found out that the way Governor George W. Bush’s friends got test scores to miraculously rise in Texas was they pushed failing kids out of the school system and gave them home GED kits, and magically the average test scores rose. In other words, they cheated. They cheated the kids that they kicked out of schools from getting a public school education. They cheated them out of the extra help that they clearly needed, and they cheated the voters out of knowing what was really going on in their schools.
If Lieberman had done his job and really researched both Dick Cheney and Geroge W. Bush, he could have destroyed Cheney in that debate. If Al Gore had really done his job and studied George W. Bush he could have destroyed Bush in the three Gore/Bush Presidential Debates. Now, Al Gore did an awful lot of things right, but whoever coached him on the Debates was an idiot. Whose idea was it to have Gore leave his podium and stand by Bush to try and intimidate him? That is grade school stuff. It looked just as stupid when Trump pulled that garbage on Hillary Clinton.
We Democrats held on to Joe Lieberman a lot longer than we should have. Sometimes you do that. Sometimes you are afraid that if you get rid of something things will be worse. Sometimes you are just familiar with something or someone. Sometimes you have a tan suit that you really want to hold onto.
So nowadays, we have Republicans slamming Nancy Pelosi. They figure they have been bashing Pelosi for so long and said so many bad things about her that fear of Pelosi will really motivate their Republican base. You know, it just might a little bit. Apparently, Republicans love to hate on Democrats.
And yes, they have been bashing on Nancy Pelosi for a long time, since about 2007, when Democrats took over as the majority party for the U.S. House and put a stop to a lot of the awful crap that was happening in the Bush Admin. That is when Republicans really learned to hate Speaker Pelosi. You see from about 2003 to 2007, the Bush Admin went crazy doing all kinds of awful things--repealing regulations that protected citizens, ignoring suffering citizens in Louisiana, engaging in an incredibly expensive and stupid war in Iraq—and Speaker Pelosi put a stop to a lot of that.
Speaker Pelosi did that by doing the single most important thing that a Democratic Speaker has to do: getting the Democratic House members to hold together and vote as a unit. She did that by getting them to resist the seductions of Republicans targeting individual members. So Fox News, Right Wing radio, and the Right Wing blogosphere made Pelosi target number one, and Republican voters learned to loathe her, and they still do.
And now, we have some Democrats who want to get rid of her. They say she’s old school. They say we need fresh blood. They say that Republicans are getting their base ginned up with their hatred of her.
I read somewhere that about fifty Democrats running for the House, nine incumbents and forty-one candidates for the position, say that if they take back the House, they will not vote for her. But you know, during the Trump Administration, both the House and Senate Democrats have done an amazing job holding together. So, are these Democrats throwing Pelosi under the bus because she did a bad job, or are they just saying that to throw a bone to the Republicans, who hate her and will hate her replacement, and to the Democrats who are obsessed with "new blood”?
Well, I guess we have to decide: Is Nancy Pelosi someone that is easily changed out, or is she someone really effective that can help us achieve our goals. Is she something that we let go of, or something we dig our heels in and really fight for. Is she a tan suit, or is she Obamacare?
So, sometime after we win back the U.S. House, let us decide, is she former Senator Joe Lieberman, the GOP stooge, or is she former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, one of the hardest working and most effective Speakers the U.S. House has ever known. The decision is yours.